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< Here on this forum, espousing conservative principles is attacked from the Libertarians more than the liberals. At least some here believe in limited government, but too many have abandoned the moral imperatives that made conservativism work.
But ... Giuliani is now endorsing Simon over Riordan (Riordan is pro-abortion, etc.) for the Republican spot in November's California Governor race.
Where was Sobran when this happened?
This article is way off base.
It's true enough I suppose, but the problem is more one of demand than of supply. This age is dominated by economics and technology rather than by great political or ethical questions.
The Gingrich years demonstrated that there was only so much that politicians could or would change, and only so much any government can do without making things worse. The Clinton boom demonstrated that most people were more concerned about the economy than political or social or cultural questions. Bush showed that getting elected was still the most important thing for politicians. And now America such as it is has been attacked, and those social and cultural divisions don't seem so pressing.
There's plenty of reason to kick the lovers of empire and statism at National Review or the Weekly Standard. But the anti-state crew at Lew Rockwell isn't any more appetizing. Aside from the fact that they throw together incompatible ideas and strike absurd poses, they don't hook up with truly conservative sentiments. The problem is that there is no middle ground on the intellectual/journalistic right.
What made conservatism so successful in the 80s was that liberals had staked out all the radical and wrongheaded ideas and left conservatives with the commonsense and intelligent ones. Lately the right seem to be picking strange and extreme ideas: invade the world, perpetual war for perpetual peace, or ignore the rest of the world and wait for it to go away, massive national projects to make us feel good about America or secessionism and anarcho-capitalism.
Maybe the problem is that mainstream politics is mainstream politics and doesn't have the ability to attract intellectuals or even rouse much interest in people. There's a desire to sound clarion calls and make politics into some great moral enterprise as it was at various points in the past, but politics is a pretty pedestrian activity involved more with compromises and stopgap measures than with defeating evil and ensuring the victory of good.
On the other hand, the Reps will let me keep my gun so at least I can kill myself in order to escape the tyrrany.
Sobran refers to the two departments -- defense and education -- in Bush's discretionary budget that grew past the rate of inflation and population growth. That means he neglects to mention the other fifteen or twenty departments that shrunk before the rate of inflation and population growth in Bush's first discretionary budget.
I think that this makes Sobran nonobjective on matters on conservatism and small government.
Sobran complains about the Libertarian aspects of Giuliani.
Minor?!?!
This guy is perched so far on the fringe, he's in danger of falling off the the earth.
If he can't appreciate Reagan's legacy then what can he appreciate?
The writer fails to mention that many of these "neocons" were actually purged from ther Democrat Party, as the Marxists took over that party in its Long March through American culture, moving the Republicans leftward as well. Eventually, the Leftist will consume the Republicans too.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, conservatives (including me) wanted to feel they had triumphed, that a victory for their movement meant the permanent vanquishing of liberalism. Even liberals thought Reagan had "turned the country around." But Reagan, while repeating conservative platitudes, challenged very little of the institutional structure of liberalism and in fact embraced most of it. During his eight years in office the Federal Government continued to grow, nearly doubling its spending. As Federal deficits mounted monstrously, conservatives dropped another subject: the evils of deficit spending and unbalanced budgets.Sobran's own views have tainted his views of people. Two in particular.Still, conservatives pretended they had conquered. They equated Reagan's minor gains with the radical and lasting changes Roosevelt had effected. Reagan himself encouraged this feeling by inviting conservative leaders to White House dinners. That was all it took to sustain their delusions. After all, most of them had never been beckoned to the White House before. What better proof that they now reigned?
Claiming that Buchanan was left behind by the conservative movement is only partially true. He himself changed more than the movement, turning into a moralistic demagogue. It's true that the "right" left behind views that he continued to embrace, but those views were only a small part of the overall picture, and were indeed inconsistent with the rest of the movement. More on that later.
As others have pointed out, Ronald Reagan was not a dictator and indeed spent his entire eight years in office having to reach some accomodation with a Democratic HofR. Still, he managed to change not only the world we live in, but the terms of the political debate in this Nation. That achievement cannot be underestimated. No Democratic President would ever have said "the era of Big Government is over" (whether he meant it or not) if not for Reagan. When you change not only the way your side thinks but the way the Nation thinks, you've accomplished something.
To be sure, Reagan was not a big backer of "traditional morality" as enforced by government. A case can be made that if he had been, he would not have been as succesful. His biggest support came among voters under 30. Having been a part of that group, I can verify that if he had been a big pusher of morality laws, he would not have had that support.
Reagan sought to end laws that were actively unfriendly to traditional morality (presuming one is aware of the function of the TV or radio's off button) but he refused to pass laws to enforce it. In this respect, he changed conservativism.
But by no means was it "defining it downward". He helped it evolve into something that would stay not only relevant but competitive in the marketplace of ideas. In an important way, he helped it stay true to its core principles, as a philosophy which focuses on the right of the individual to freely make economic decisions loses consistency when it denies the same individual the right to make personal behavioral decisions.
-Eric